The legal change represented by gay marriage is tiny and the fallout for religion is disputed. The government's thinking about what it will actually do and when are buried in the haze. Surrounding debates concerning the effect on ancient requirements that consummation and adultery involve a vagina are every bit as obscure as they are prurient. Only one thing is perspicaciously clear, and that is where the hysterical arguments against change put by, among others, the Church of England will lie once this saga has run its course – namely, on the wrong side of history.

Like the tsarist minister who objected to the Moscow-St Petersburg railway on the grounds that "it will encourage useless movement of the people", after yesterday's consultation response the church lies strewn perilously across the tracks of progress. Like the British statesmen who resisted the female franchise before granting it with a minimum age of 30, the bishops are adopting a stance that is guaranteed to be remembered as ridiculous before long. Although many used their seats in the Lords to back wrecking amendments to the original civil partnership law a few years ago, the ecclesiastical elite now shamelessly speak as if they were always united in favour of that reform. They imply that it is a matter of weighty regret that things have now reached a pass where their only conscionable option is to declare "thus far and no further".

Three forms of flannel are offered in justification. The first is doctrinal. The Bible is replete with inconvenient details such as those about King Solomon's 700 wives, so the church's document sources the insistence that marriage must be between one man and one woman not to the good book itself, but rather to its own volume of prayers and traditional services. The second objection is that the government's plan for the first time drives a wedge between civil and religious marriage, but – if this is true at all – it is only so because ministers have already kowtowed to zealous hectoring and restricted their scope to civil weddings. Until recently, a weird determination to define a no-go zone for the omnipresent around civil partnership ceremonies barred even those Quaker meeting houses and liberal synagogues who wanted to host them from doing so. Third and finally comes the wildly speculative claim that, whatever the reassurances, pesky human rights lawyers will soon drag clergymen kicking and screaming to the altar to bless same-sex unions. This is a potentially serious point, seeing as to require any priest to solemnise what he believes to be sordid would be to mandate hypocrisy and thereby demean the prospective services. It turns out, however, that it simply does not apply. One leading practitioner explained yesterday that the European convention's article 9 would provide ample protection for any cleric who wanted nothing to do with gay weddings, and a decades-old system that allows divorcees to remarry while granting an opt-out to any vicar who would rather not get involved is a practical precedent which has endured.

Two centuries have passed since the C of E was caricatured as "the Tory party at prayer". With their concern for the downtrodden, the clergy and congregation alike would want to resist that description today. And yet we are in a position where there are the parliamentary votes to write gay marriage on the statute book through a free vote, and the church seems bent on siding with the Tory ultras against a Conservative prime minister. Most vicars are warmly understanding towards the real homosexuals they encounter in their own flocks, and yet in the public debate the church refuses to preach what it practices. The C of E clings on to its anachronistic established status with the claim that this allows it to serve the whole community, and yet it fights tooth and nail against a small change to extend the ordinary language of love to a minority of relationships that feel keenly excluded from it.

All told, it is a terrible knot of paradoxes to get caught up in. And all for the sake of the dubious doctrine of unripe time.